Cheerleading injuries more serious than you may think

However, it also indicated that cheerleading injuries, when they do occur, may be more severe than those seen in other sports.

A new movie is out this month on NFL concussions, and the doctor who is the subject of the piece says football for anyone under age 18 should be banned – but an upcoming white paper from the American Council on Science and Health notes that a ban may be too heavy-handed.

Although 96.8 percent of the injured cheerleaders were girls, the overall injury rate was higher among boys.

“That may be because cheerleaders, due to the nature of the sport, are more likely to have falls from elevation – for example, flyers during stunts – or to land awkwardly or be struck by another athlete landing awkwardly – for example, bases during stunts”.

About 400,000 students in the United States participate in high school cheerleading each year, including more than 123,000 involved in competitive “spirit squads” that incorporate stunts, pyramids, tosses and jumps, according to the U.S. National Federation of State High School Associations.

Because some states refuse to classify the activity as a sport, high schools are not compelled to provide cheerleaders with a special place to practice. “Understanding the epidemiology of cheerleading injuries is the important first step toward that goal”.

This injury rate was significantly lower than that of all other sports combined and all other girls sports combined.

For this study, a team of researchers led by Dawn Comstock, PhD, an associate professor of epidemiology at CU, looked at high school cheerleading injuries from 2009 through 2014. Across the period of the study, there were some 1.1 million athletic exposures or practices, or competitions with potential for injuries and 793 injuries resulted from cheerleading.

More than half of all accidents happened during stunts, the researchers reported in Pediatrics.

Dustin Currie from the Colorado School of Public Health said, “Our research shows that at the national level in terms of typical day-to-day sports participation cheerleading is not particularly risky and appears perhaps to be even safer than other sports”. Sixteen percent of injuries came from pyramid formations and 9 percent from tumbling, typically as the result of contact from another person. This may explain why injuries became more severe.

But the good news is that injury rate associated with the tremendously popular activity among high school students is one of the lowest in all athletic activities on US school grounds.

When injuries did occur, they were often serious.

In about 16.2% of the injury cases, cheerleaders needed to take three weeks or more off, coming in second behind gymnastics.

Consequently, the vast majority of today’s high school cheerleaders are athletes.